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]]>A recent article in The Energy Mix highlights a growing risk that many municipal leaders already feel on the ground: cities that fail to properly assess climate risk are setting themselves up for long-term financial and infrastructure instability. In the United States, researchers are now documenting a “climate-debt doom loop,” where repeated climate shocks erode property values, weaken municipal tax bases, and make it increasingly difficult to finance the resilience investments communities need to remain safe and solvent. Canada is not immune to this dynamic. While our municipal finance system differs from that of the U.S., the underlying risk exposure is the same. Climate impacts are accelerating, infrastructure is aging, and many municipalities lack the tools needed to understand their true risk, let alone to prioritize and finance adaptation in a disciplined, defensible way. This is the gap NOAH CityTwin
was created to address.
The Need for Decision-Grade Insights
Most municipalities today are not ignoring climate change. The challenge is structural rather than motivational. Cities are being asked to make multi-decade infrastructure decisions about stormwater systems, roads, buildings, and emergency response using tools that were never designed to account for compounding climate risk. Climate studies often arrive as static reports. Engineering assessments live in separate silos. Financial planning models rarely integrate physical risk in a meaningful way. The result is a disconnect between climate science and capital planning, between risk awareness and investment prioritization, and between adaptation intent and implementable projects. NOAH CityTwin was built to close that gap.
From Reports to Living City-Scale Intelligence
NOAH CityTwin is a city-scale climate intelligence and digital twin platform that allows municipalities to see, test, and act on climate risk in an integrated decision environment. Rather than producing another report, the platform creates a living digital representation of a city, bringing together climate hazards, infrastructure assets, and financial implications in a queryable single system. Municipal leaders can quantify physical climate risk, evaluate vulnerability across asset classes, test adaptation scenarios, and understand trade-offs before capital is committed. This enables a shift from reactive responses to proactive, evidence-based decisions grounded not only in climate projections, but in how those projections interact with real infrastructure and real budgets.
Making Climate Adaptation Capital-Ready
One of the most important insights raised in The Energy Mix article is that climate adaptation struggles to attract capital not because it lacks value, but because that value is rarely made legible to financial decision-makers. Adaptation reduces risk, protects tax bases, and avoids future losses, yet those benefits are often diffuse, long-dated, and difficult to quantify. NOAH CityTwin was designed to change that dynamic. By translating physical climate risk into prioritized, defensible investment pathways, the platform helps municipalities and their partners turn resilience into projects that can be evaluated, financed, and delivered. In doing so, it creates a bridge between climate science, engineering, insurance, and capital, allowing adaptation to be treated not as a cost centre, but as a strategic investment in long-term fiscal stability.
Scaling Capacity Across Municipalities
The article also underscores another reality: many Canadian municipalities, particularly smaller and mid-sized communities, simply do not have the internal capacity to conduct sophisticated climate risk assessments. NOAH CityTwin is built to scale across that reality. By providing a shared, standardized, and technically rigorous platform, it gives communities of different sizes access to the same level of decision-grade climate intelligence, helping ensure that resilience planning is not limited to the largest or best-resourced cities.
Why this Matters Now
We built NOAH CityTwin because the next phase of climate adaptation will not be won by awareness alone. It will be won by communities that can clearly understand their risk, prioritize investments with confidence, attract capital and insurance support, and make resilience a measurable part of long-term planning. As climate impacts intensify, the cost of inaction accrues interest. The choice facing municipalities is no longer whether to adapt, but whether they will do so deliberately or be forced into it by crisis. NOAH CityTwin exists to give cities the clarity, confidence, and tools they need to choose the former. The post Why We Built NOAH CityTwin™ appeared first on NOAH.
]]>The article notes practical red flags, like basement vulnerabilities, alongside a deeper structural problem: flood risk information in Canada remains fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult for the public to interpret. As extreme rainfall becomes more common, that lack of transparency is itself a source of risk.
Flood risk transparency is not the end goal. But it is the necessary beginning.
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]]>A recent Canadian Press article published by CTV on climate risk and house shopping highlights a quiet but important shift underway in Canada’s housing market: flood risk is no longer a secondary concern. It is becoming a first-order consideration for buyers, homeowners, and real estate professionals alike.
The article notes practical red flags, like basement vulnerabilities, alongside a deeper structural problem: flood risk information in Canada remains fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult for the public to interpret. As extreme rainfall becomes more common, that lack of transparency is itself a source of risk.
Flood risk transparency is not the end goal. But it is the necessary beginning.
Why transparency comes first
As the article makes clear, most people don’t realize they are exposed to flood risk until after a loss. In most cities, the dominant driver of damage is surface water overwhelming stormwater systems that were designed for a different climate and much less rainfall.
Without clear, asset-level information, buyers are forced to guess, owners are forced to react, and asset managers are forced to spread capital thinly across portfolios. Credible flood risk transparency changes that. When risk is visible and specific, it becomes something that can be planned for rather than feared.
This is true for an individual homeowner deciding whether to install a backflow valve, and it is equally true for a real estate asset manager deciding where resilience capital will have the greatest impact.
Resilience is mostly practical and affordable
One of the most hopeful takeaways from the article is how ordinary many effective solutions are. Grading, drainage, sump pumps, sewer backflow valves, alarms, and routine maintenance account for a large share of avoided losses. These are not speculative technologies or massive infrastructure projects. They are sensible interventions applied where they matter most.
For homeowners, the cost of these upgrades is often far less than a single uninsured flood event. For asset managers, targeted mitigation routinely outperforms cosmetic renovations in preserving long-term value and insurability.
The challenge has never been a lack of solutions. It has been a lack of clarity about which solutions are needed, where, and why.
Individual action and collective responsibility
The Canadian Press article also underscores a critical point: not all flood risk can or should be managed at the individual property level. Many losses occur because of system-wide failures, like undersized storm sewers, blocked flow paths, or downstream bottlenecks that no single homeowner can fix.
This is where flood risk transparency becomes a coordination tool for cities and government agencies. When risks are mapped consistently across neighbourhoods and communities, it becomes possible to distinguish what should be addressed collectively through municipal investment from what can be handled individually through property-level upgrades.
That distinction is essential for effective resilience. It prevents overburdening homeowners with problems they cannot solve alone, while also avoiding public investments that could be more efficiently addressed at the asset level.
Resilience by design
Resilience is not about eliminating risk. It is about understanding it well enough to manage it intelligently.
The hopeful message for homeowners and real estate asset managers is this: most flood losses are preventable, most solutions are sensible, and most investments are affordable. What has been missing is not capability, but transparency.
Flood risk transparency is the starting point. From there, resilience stops being an abstract aspiration and becomes a design problem that can be addressed step by step, property by property, and city by city.
That is how resilience is built: not through blind hope, but through intelligent design.
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]]>By Ian Bickis The Canadian Press
TORONTO – When Kathryn Bakos was house hunting a few years ago, her checklist included some things that might not come first in mind for a dream home.
“I did not want a reverse-sloped driveway,” she explained in an interview.
“My husband said, well, what happens if we find our perfect home? I said, it’s not our perfect home if it has a reverse slope.”
Such driveways direct water toward the home, an issue Bakos is well aware of after researching how increasingly common catastrophic floods hurt home values.
The angle of a driveway is just one of many hazards home shoppers need to understand as climate change creates more extreme weather trends, said Bakos, managing director of finance and resilience at University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.
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]]>Originally published in Toronto Star, Jan 29, 2026
By Ian Bickis The Canadian Press
TORONTO – When Kathryn Bakos was house hunting a few years ago, her checklist included some things that might not come first in mind for a dream home. “I did not want a reverse-sloped driveway,” she explained in an interview.
“My husband said, well, what happens if we find our perfect home? I said, it’s not our perfect home if it has a reverse slope.”
Such driveways direct water toward the home, an issue Bakos is well aware of after researching how increasingly common catastrophic floods hurt home values.
The angle of a driveway is just one of many hazards home shoppers need to understand as climate change creates more extreme weather trends, said Bakos, managing director of finance and resilience at University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.
And while figuring out the level of risk any home faces isn’t an easy task, she said it’s important to remember that no one is completely immune.
“If you live anywhere that it rains, you’re at risk of flooding.”
The need to understand the threats is growing along with the damages. The past decade saw $37 billion in total insured losses from catastrophic weather, nearly triple the previous decade, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.
Assessing risks can start with the property itself — looking for grading and where water will flow, along with what kind of protections the house has against that water. Features like a backflow valve that blocks overflowing sewer systems, a sump pump to get water out, and an alarm system to warn water is in the basement are becoming increasingly important, said Bakos.
Checking on the chances of a potential flood or wildfire in an area is less straightforward, said Chris Chopik, a realtor at Sotheby’s. Flood risk mapping in Canada is often fragmented, outdated and can be hard to interpret, he said.
“In every jurisdiction, you’re going to have a different landscape, because there’s no, sort of, universal, one window access to the information.”
The federal government has been working to update the flood mapping system, with an expected $220 million spent between 2021 and 2028, but it’s not clear when the public might have full access to the data.
Natural Resources Canada also wants to develop a national approach to home labelling, which would create standard information for energy performance and climate resiliency, but it’s still in the consultation phase.
For now, there’s a patchwork of systems, like flood plain maps produced by Ontario Conservation Authorities and cities like Calgary, as well as maps that cover a wider range of hazards, like PEI’s Climate Hazard & Risk Information System.
The challenges of interpreting some of the maps and data mean it can be a good idea to seek out experts who have deeper knowledge of the risks, said Chopik.
“It would always be my advice to engage a real estate professional who has good answers to questions that you’re curious about.”
Private services are also trying to fill some of the gaps.
Noah Intelligence Inc. has set a goal to ultimately map the flood risk of every home in Canada, but has set a target for all of Toronto by the end of March.
The company’s approach includes going beyond flood plain mapping to look at how stormwater systems react to high water flows, which lead to the flooded basements that cause much of the damage.
“The vast majority of that flooding comes from inadequate stormwater management systems. They weren’t built for today’s extreme rainfall,” said Chris Godsall, who co-founded the company with Steve Van Haren.
He pointed to the July 2024 flash floods in Toronto and southern Ontario that caused about a billion dollars of insured damage as an example.
“That wasn’t a climate catastrophe. It wasn’t a hurricane. It wasn’t a hailstorm. It was just a lot of rain that overwhelmed the stormwater system.”
Godsall said the plan is to provide some level of flood data for homes for free, and charge a small fee for greater detail.
Canadian real estate listing companies have generally not yet started including climate data because sources remain a challenge.
“There is no agreed upon mapping of climate risk in Canada, meaning we can’t access data that would permit displaying alongside property listings,” said Pierre Leduc, spokesperson for the Canadian Real Estate Association which owns Realtor.ca.
But buyers are paying more attention to extreme weather, said Katie Sanga, a sales representative at Re/Max Professionals North in Huntsville, Ont.
“They’re definitely more cautious, and more aware of what’s going on in the area for climate risks,” said Sanga, noting two major floods in the Muskoka region in the last decade have helped raise awareness.
“Buyers look at the long-term view now, as opposed to just looking at what’s happened in the most recent years.”
Rural properties can raise more subtle risks, like shoreline erosion as the spring runoff gets more intense, said Sanga. Natural vegetation helps dampen the problem, she said.
For buyers, it’s also important not only to assess the risks of the property, but to check in on factors like insurance, especially if there’s risk of flooding, she said.
“I would definitely suggest doing a condition based on getting adequate insurance for the property.”
Overall, the shifting risk factors and variety of data sources means homebuyers have to make sure they both do their research, and check in with experts, said Sanga.
“The biggest thing is to do your homework.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 29, 2026.
The Canadian Press
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]]>Here are some key findings:
Executive Summary
Canada is already spending billions of dollars each year reacting to climate damage, yet the systems, markets, and technologies required to anticipate, price, and reduce physical climate risk remain underdeveloped. The MaRS / Tailwind Futures Canadian Adaptation and Resilience Innovation Playbook confirms what NOAH sees daily in the field: adaptation demand is real, growing, and costly, but poorly structured, reactive, and misaligned with innovation supply.
NOAH exists precisely to close this gap.
The post Canada’s Emerging Adaptation Market appeared first on NOAH.
]]>MaRS / Tailwind Futures Adaptation & Resilience Innovation Playbook.
Here are some key findings:Executive Summary
Canada is already spending billions of dollars each year reacting to climate damage, yet the systems, markets, and technologies required to anticipate, price, and reduce physical climate risk remain underdeveloped. The MaRS / Tailwind Futures Canadian Adaptation and Resilience Innovation Playbook confirms what NOAH sees daily in the field: adaptation demand is real, growing, and costly, but poorly structured, reactive, and misaligned with innovation supply. NOAH exists precisely to close this gap.
The Problem: Reactive Spending, Invisible Risk
Across federal, provincial, and municipal governments, more than $3.5B was spent in 2024 on climate adaptation and resilience. However, this spending is:
- Overwhelmingly reactive, dominated by disaster response, recovery, and infrastructure repair.
- Narrowly focused, especially at the municipal level where over 90% of spending targets water and sanitation, largely through post-event upgrades.
- Poorly translated into market demand, with limited mechanisms to signal needs to innovators or attract private capital.
At the same time, corporations overwhelmingly acknowledge physical climate risk but rarely quantify or invest in mitigation beyond core asset protection. Consumers bear growing costs, yet adaptation spending remains diffuse and largely unmeasured.
The result is a paradox: high and rising climate risk, massive public expenditure, and yet a weak, fragmented adaptation market.
The Innovation Mismatch: Where Capital Doesn’t Go
The Playbook identifies a stark misalignment between where climate risk is highest and where innovation capital flows:
- Pure-play adaptation startups receive only 4% of climate-tech funding in Canada.
- Venture investment is heavily concentrated in food and agriculture, while sectors with the greatest public exposure (urban flooding, stormwater, buildings, and infrastructure) remain undercapitalized.
- A persistent “missing middle” exists between early validation and scalable deployment, especially for technologies serving municipalities and infrastructure owners.
These “hidden gem” sectors, such as water, cities, infrastructure, and mitigation are exactly where NOAH operates.
NOAH’s Role: Making Adaptation Investable
NOAH was built to address the structural failures identified in the Playbook:
1. Turning climate risk into measurable demand
NOAH’s HydroSim platform models flood behaviour and climate impacts at the property, asset, and neighbourhood scale, converting abstract risk into quantifiable exposure. This allows municipalities, insurers, and property owners to:
- Identify priority investments
- Compare mitigation options
- Justify proactive spending before disasters occur
2. Bridging public demand and private capital
The Playbook highlights the difficulty of financing adaptation where buyers are public entities and returns are indirect. NOAH’s scorecards and decision tools create:
- Clear economic cases for resilience investments
- Asset-level insights that insurers, lenders, and owners can price and act on
- A pathway for blended finance and incentive alignment
3. Operating in the “Hidden Gems”
Water, stormwater, and urban flooding dominate public adaptation budgets but lack scalable innovation. NOAH’s focus on urban hydrology, surface water flooding, and infrastructure interaction directly targets the sectors with the highest unmet demand.
Why This Matters Now
Even under aggressive emissions reduction scenarios, physical climate risk is locked in. As the Playbook makes clear, adaptation is no longer optional, but without better tools, Canada will continue to overspend on recovery while underinvesting in prevention.
NOAH represents a shift from:
- Reaction → foresight
- Aggregate budgets → asset-specific decisions
- Moral arguments → measurable risk and return
Conclusion
The MaRS / Tailwind Futures Playbook confirms that Canada’s adaptation challenge is not a lack of awareness or funding, it is a market design problem. NOAH is purpose-built to solve that problem by making climate risk visible, decision-ready, and investable. In doing so, NOAH sits squarely at the intersection the Playbook identifies as most urgent: where public demand is highest, innovation supply is weakest, and the economic case for resilience is finally becoming unavoidable.
To view and download the report, click the button below.
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]]>When areas in Bedford, Nova Scotia, experienced more than 250 millimetres of rain in just days in July 2023, the resulting devastation caused country-wide alarm. Considered one of the highest impact flash floods in Canadian history, the incident served as a stark reminder how extreme weather events increasingly place communities at risk.
Flooding, the most common and costly disaster in Canada, already incurs nearly $800-million in insured losses annually. What’s more, climate models predict that events that occurred once every two decades in Canada could happen every five years by the end of the century, making projections based on historic data inherently inaccurate...
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]]>Originally published in The Globe and Mail, September 17, 2025
When areas in Bedford, Nova Scotia, experienced more than 250 millimetres of rain in just days in July 2023, the resulting devastation caused country-wide alarm. Considered one of the highest impact flash floods in Canadian history, the incident served as a stark reminder how extreme weather events increasingly place communities at risk.
Flooding, the most common and costly disaster in Canada, already incurs nearly $800-million in insured losses annually. What’s more, climate models predict that events that occurred once every two decades in Canada could happen every five years by the end of the century, making projections based on historic data inherently inaccurate.
That’s where clear and up-to-date insights on risk factors can make a big difference, says Chris Godsall, CEO of NOAH Intelligence Inc., a data and analytics company focused on generating highly accurate property-specific flood risk assessments.
“It’s a bit like a medical diagnosis. Knowing that high cholesterol is generally associated with negative health outcomes is one thing – being confronted with your own cholesterol levels another,” he says. “We can provide accurate flood risk scorecards for individual properties and offer recommendations for solutions on being more resilient.”
Using science-based advanced physical simulation and AI, NOAH illustrates the impacts of future weather events at a property level. A simulation model for a drainage system in North York, for example, played out different rainfall scenarios – showing areas of high and extreme flood risk near a sewershed.
“In this model, we did 14 simulations – and 1,140 of the properties were flooded in 11 out of 14 storms,” says Mr. Godsall. “You can have two buildings, walking distance from each other, with one being essentially resilient and the other having very high flood hazard.”
Knowing the odds of a property being impacted by increased rainfall over the next five years “can help everyone, from homeowners and businesses to real estate investment trusts and insurance companies,” he explains, adding that it also enables informed decision-making by “governments that have limited resources available for dealing with infrastructure that wasn’t built for today’s climate.”
“R-LABS delivers innovation through partnerships with game-changing entrepreneurs and through venture-building. The resulting ecosystem of innovative companies offers more comprehensive and robust solutions than would be possible in a siloed approach.”
George Carras, Founder and CEO, R-LABS
Getting to a national framework for resiliency starts with property owners taking action – and NOAH offers a pathway to implementing concrete measures as well as setting up reward systems where municipalities and insurance companies can support risk mitigation, states Mr. Godsall.
“In a world where climate events are getting more and more intense, partnerships and innovation are key,” says George Carras, founder and CEO of real estate venture builder R-LABS.
“There are three facets to innovation: coming up with the new idea, developing the innovation and disseminating the solution,” he explains. “R-LABS is a growing partnership where innovative organizations can bring their unique capabilities and pilot and scale things that have never been done before.”
Already boosting a “great diversity of capabilities, R-LABS delivers innovation through partnerships with game-changing entrepreneurs and through venture-building,” Mr. Carras says. “The resulting ecosystem of innovative companies offers more comprehensive and robust solutions than would be possible in a siloed approach.”
Take, for example, NOAH’s flood risk scorecards and Assembly, another R-LABS partner company that delivers prefabricated wood buildings helping non-profit housing providers and municipalities meet budget constraints, he notes. “Communities that need affordable housing also have to consider sustainability and flood resilience, so each of our companies brings tremendous synergy.”
By helping assess and validate ideas and pilot innovations, R-LABS propagates a business model where the companies solve a problem and make money, says Mr. Carras. “R-LABS equals a return for society plus a return on investment.”
“It’s an example of partners who look at a problem together and develop solutions. That’s a great Canadian strength: the power of commercial co-operation to lift something up.”
Chris Godsall, CEO, NOAH Intelligence Inc.
Mr. Godsall sees scale and affordability as key for the path to resiliency – and for delivering solutions that are widely accessible. That’s where R-LABS’ innovation ecosystem serves as a powerful catalyst, he says. “It’s an example of partners who look at a problem together and develop solutions. That’s a great Canadian strength: the power of commercial co-operation to lift something up.”
It also serves to “harness Canada’s innate leadership, skill sets and knowledge to swing for the fences,” says Mr. Godsall, who arrived at NOAH with a track record for founding winning enterprises, such as Santropol Roulant, a Montreal-based non-profit tackling social isolation and food insecurity; Triton Timber, a cleantech company reclaiming submerged logs; and Ziva Dynamics, an award-winning character simulation and animation software firm.
“My experience over the past 30 years brought me to this exciting space, which combines sustainability, hydrological engineering and physics-based simulation,” he says, explaining that he works with Steve Van Haren, the former lead engineer for WSP’s stormwater management practice. “To become a global leader in a specific area, deep expertise needs to be embedded in the founding team. And when it comes to this particular space, we have the best in the world.”
Solutions like NOAH have the potential to make a big impact for Canadian communities and the overall economy, and Mr. Carras says they can also “be scaled up to help other countries, since they address not only local or Canadian issues but global problems.”
R-LABS has been operating since 2018 – and recently stepped up efforts with “our own ideation AI called Athena,” he says. “It allows us to collectively leverage the learnings from the past and the knowledge assets of the 43 ventures we have in the lab. It enables us to do things in one afternoon that in the past may have taken months.”
This boosts the already impressive potential for value creation through innovation, adds Mr. Carras: “R-LABS has the right partners. It’s the right platform in the right place at the right time.”
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]]>As climate change accelerates, cities and property owners face increasing uncertainty around flood risk. Extreme rainfall events are becoming more intense and frequent, resulting in incomplete risk assessments, underprepared communities, and missed opportunities to fund and prioritize climate resilience.
At NOAH Intelligence, we know that escalating climate volatility demands better climate resiliency tools. NOAH HydroSim™ Flood Modelling sets the new standard, combining real-world event data with advanced simulation to generate truly actionable flood risk insights. It’s not just about predicting floods – it’s about equipping people, governments, and industries to prevent losses, protect lives, and build smarter for the future.
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]]>Insurers & Investors Need Better Property Flood Data
As climate change accelerates, cities and property owners face increasing uncertainty around flood risk. Extreme rainfall events are becoming more intense and frequent, resulting in incomplete risk assessments, underprepared communities, and missed opportunities to fund and prioritize climate resilience.
At NOAH Intelligence, we know that escalating climate volatility demands better climate resiliency tools. NOAH HydroSim Flood Modelling sets the new standard, combining real-world event data with advanced simulation to generate truly actionable flood risk insights. It’s not just about predicting floods – it’s about equipping people, governments, and industries to prevent losses, protect lives, and build smarter for the future.
Traditional Flood Models
Conventional flood risk models often rely on climate projections applied across broad grid cells (often 10–100 km wide), failing to account for the highly localized nature of rainfall and stormwater runoff behavior. These models also tend to overlook the real-world complexities of urban infrastructure – like the drainage capacity and configuration of storm sewers, the elevation of basements, or the way water flows over different elevations in a neighborhood.
Critically, modelling procedure typically uses return period estimates based on historic rainfall intensity and frequency alone. But as climate change impacts grow, extreme events are becoming more common (e.g., what was once a 1-in-100-year storm may now be a 1-in-20-year event) and these projections no longer represent the true, dynamic risk of flooding from extreme rainfall.
What Makes NOAH HydroSim Different?
NOAH HydroSim Flood Modelling eliminates projection bias by anchoring flood risk in the physical realities of extreme weather. Our system incorporates a curated set of actual historic rainfall events that have occurred within the climate region of a given property – ensuring that NOAH simulations reflect real-world storm behavior, instead of focusing on theoretical trends.
Why This Matters for Cities, Insurers, and Investors
- Unbiased, Property-Level Precision: NOAH HydroSim delivers risk profiles with real-world context – ideal for underwriting, investment decisions, and capital planning.
- Better Scorecards, Smarter Decisions: NOAH’s Flood Risk Scorecards are physics-based outputs, enabling a higher standard of risk communication. Real estate owners can finally act on meaningful data – not approximations.
- Unlocking Adaptation Finance: With adaptation funding still chronically underdelivered – particularly for cities – NOAH HydroSim provides the technical backbone needed for feasibility studies, pre-investment assessments, and bankable project proposals.
- Future-Ready Infrastructure Planning: As rainfall patterns shift and infrastructure ages, property managers must assess vulnerabilities with the most advanced tools available. NOAH HydroSim provides the simulations needed to justify and prioritize upgrades before disaster strikes.
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]]>The investment, led by R-LABS, underscores growing recognition of NOAH’s cutting-edge technology and its potential to address the challenges posed by flooding and climate change.
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]]>Toronto, ON – April 16, 2025 – NOAH Intelligence Inc., a leading innovator in advanced flood risk management solutions, today announced the successful closing of a private investment round. The funding will support the company’s mission to transform how communities and organizations predict, mitigate, and manage flood-related risks.
The investment, led by R-LABS, underscores growing recognition of NOAH’s cutting-edge technology and its potential to address the challenges posed by flooding and climate change.
“This funding marks a significant milestone,” said Chris Godsall, co-founder and CEO of NOAH. NOAH’s co-founder and President, Steve Van Haren, is a former Lead Engineer with WSP. He added that the company is rapidly developing its technology platform to enhance predictive capabilities, and to deliver scalable solutions to help governments, businesses, and individuals proactively manage flood risks. “We’re excited to work alongside R-LABS as we continue to push the boundaries of innovation in climate resilience,” said Van Haren.
Flooding remains one of the most destructive and costly natural disasters worldwide, with damages totaling billions of dollars annually. NOAH’s proprietary platform leverages advanced pluvial flood data analytics and physical simulation to deliver actionable insights that empower decision-makers to minimize the devastating impact of floods.
“NOAH’s approach to flood risk management addresses an urgent need for citizens and organizations in Canadian cities. We are proud to support their vision and are confident that their technology will play a critical role in building more resilient communities,” said George Carras, R-LABS CEO.
The newly secured funds will accelerate the development of NOAH’s next-generation flood risk solutions and will drive market expansion across Canada, and beyond. For more information about NOAH and its suite of advanced flood risk solutions, please visit www.noahintelligence.com
About NOAH Intelligence Inc.
Founded in Toronto, Canada, NOAH Intelligence Inc. is dedicated to transforming how flood risk is managed. By harnessing the power of pluvial flood data and physical simulation, NOAH delivers innovative, predictive solutions that enable proactive decision-making, protect communities, and reduce economic losses caused by flooding.
About R-LABS:
R-LABS is The Real Estate Industry Venture Builder, established in 2018 as a partnership of innovative corporations, institutions, industry organizations, and game-changing entrepreneurs to build and grow great companies that solve major problems in real estate and housing. www.rlabs.ca
Media Contact:
Chris Godsall, CEO
NOAH Intelligence Inc.
[email protected]
www.noahintelligence.com
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]]>“The flooding last summer – and in 2013 and 2018 – was predictable,” says Van Haren, a former Principal Water Resources Engineer with WSP. He points to the train station that was shut down last July 16th when three hours of heavy rain from trailing thunderstorms caused widespread flooding in Toronto (and $990 million of property damage).
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]]>By Matt Skynner (Managing Director, R-LABS Canada)
Steve Van Haren and Chris Godsall are sitting in the head office of NOAH Intelligence, looking out the window at Toronto’s Union Station across the street.
“The flooding last summer – and the flooding in 2013 and 2018 – was predictable,” says Van Haren, a former Principal Water Resources Engineer with WSP. He points to the train station that was shut down last July 16th by three hours of heavy rain from trailing thunderstorms. Flooding from the storms caused $990 million of property damage in the Toronto region.
The co-founders of NOAH have very different backgrounds, but you could easily assume they’ve known each other all their lives – and might comfortably finish the other’s sentences.
“Flooding obeys the laws of physics,” says Godsall, whose last venture, a physics-based simulation technology company, was acquired by Unity Technologies in San Francisco.
“When we properly model the physics of flooding,” says Van Haren, “Then accurate flood risk prediction for all of these buildings finally becomes possible.”
Van Haren finishes his sentence by panning from east to west in the direction of Sewershed 42, one of sixty-seven sewersheds in Toronto. The area contains property that NOAH estimates is worth over a trillion dollars. It was among the worst affected last summer when the sudden rain overwhelmed drainage systems. Van Haren knows that many of the buildings are vulnerable to climate risk and that most owners are deprived of accurate flood risk data.
Few, if any, have more experience understanding flood risk than Van Haren. As one of Canada’s leading stormwater engineers, he spent two and half decades analyzing and designing flood mitigation, enhanced flood modelling, flood defense, control and flood prevention systems for international corporations and municipalities, including some of the largest commercial real estate firms in Canada.
“Over 250,000 passengers use Union Station every day,” says Godsall, looking at the train station below.
Godsall likes to put things into context. It helps, he says, to motivate the vision needed to solve big problems. This is the fourth “big solution” company he’s started. Earlier efforts earned Godsall a Meritorious Service Medal from the Government of Canada, and prior customers for his ventures include Apple, Sony, IKEA, Rio Tinto, Bell Labs and NIKE. For his work, Maclean’s Magazine named Godsall as one of Canada’s 100 Leaders and Dreamers.
“Union Station survived the Great Fire of Toronto in 1904,” he says, still looking below. “But the building that stood where we are today didn’t. It was destroyed in the fire, along with over one hundred other buildings. One in forty people in Toronto were put out of work.”
“Water is the New Fire,” says Van Haren, then quickly clarifies that he didn’t make up the axiom.
It’s actually the title of a 2023 Weather Network original documentary by Shawney Cohen that highlights the alarming risks of climate change and flooding in cities. Van Haren adds – for context – that every big story has a beginning.
“When it comes to flood defense”, says Van Haren. “Most property owners are at the start of their journey. Unlike those fires from last century, we have the technology to implement resilience at scale. We can adapt.”
By simulating the physics of flooding, Van Haren and Godsall are taking a more advanced approach to understanding flood risk. In addition to technical improvements, there is something very different about NOAH – and it can be found in Van Haren’s words. The difference starts with a simple shift toward hope. Thanks to NOAH’s scalable solution, delivering physically-accurate flood scorecards for every property in Canada is now possible. But it’s more than that. NOAH is creating a company based on the idea that adaptation to climate change is feasible. They don’t just inform property owners, insurers and banks about flood risk. NOAH also provides realistic engineered solutions. The combination of accurate flood risk assessments with feasible adaptation solutions is what truly differentiates this ambitious Canadian climate technology company. We sat down to find out more about the founders and what motivated them to start NOAH.
What inspired you to start this company, and what problem are you trying to solve?
Steve: “I’ve been working on this problem for over twenty-five years. As an engineer, I was inspired to bring a new approach to a problem that can’t be completely solved with traditional flood modelling. This is a dynamic physical and hydrological problem. Solving challenges for large international clients gave me the experience to understand the complexities of flood risk data and envision dynamic flood resilience solutions.”
Chris: “For me, flooding was the obvious next chapter. It’s a huge problem facing almost all Canadians. And it affects people everywhere in the world. I’ve spent over half my career either running companies in marine engineering or physical simulation software. Applying physics-based simulation to flooding is incredibly exciting. It’s a big idea that makes a lot of sense and that can help a lot of people in Canada and around the world.”
What personal experiences shaped your vision for this business?
Steve: “If you have a viable solution to a problem that will affect your children – and their children – then it doesn’t take much to wake up in the morning and go to work. The world needs companies like NOAH to address climate risks. I don’t like to sound dramatic. But it’s true.”
Chris: “By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was leading an organization that was both innovative and that created measurable social and environmental benefits. That’s a positive feedback loop that I’ve brought to all my businesses. It touches on how we recruit talented people, raise capital from high quality investors and how we work with clients that are starting their flood risk journey. It’s a great playbook for success”
How did you validate the need for your product or service before launching?
Steve: “We spent months interviewing commercial real estate managers across many departments and we met with senior executives for insurance and finance organizations. Not one was satisfied with their current tools for flood risk.”
Chris: “NOAH also developed a pilot program to allow customers from all four major segments – Real Estate, Insurance, Finance and Government – to easily test our Flood Risk Scorecards and our models.”
What challenges did you face in the early stages, and how did you overcome them?
Steve: “The biggest challenge was getting busy people to focus on a problem that seemed like tomorrow’s crisis. Early adopters of climate resilience now get the fact that these flood-causing storms are coming every year. Soon everyone will have to adjust to the new reality that the storms are not only coming every year – but they’re getting more intense.”
Chris: “The floods in 2024 occurred – and other climate events since. These events have focused people more on starting the process of understanding business risks associated with flooding.”
How has your mission evolved since you first started, and where do you see the company in the future?
Steve: “When we first started, the mission was more tactical. It was focused purely on technical solutions to the problem of flood risk accuracy and on the solutions associated with flood defense. Starting a new business has to start with the details of the core technology and product. Our details are complex, so NOAH’s mission started with our technical and flood modelling methodology.”
Chris: “To be honest, our mission has stayed very consistent. We are here to apply technology and physics to estimating flood risk. The one thing that changed is now we are more specific about how and when we’re going to deliver our solutions to all properties in Canada. Where do we see ourselves in the future? We’ve been clear that our goal is to first serve Canada, and then US and European markets, because they are facing the same problem as us. Every market deserves and needs accurate flood risk solutions.”
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]]>NOAH Intelligence has developed dynamic flood modeling and flood simulation technologies to provide greater accuracy and scalability for property managers, real estate agencies, insurance companies, financial institutions and municipalities. The company is on a mission to help all property owners manage the reality of their flood risk using accurate data and achievable flood defense.
To make this possible, NOAH produces specialized flood models that reveal new and more accurate dimensions of property-level flood risk. NOAH then simulates future extreme weather events and gathers data on their impacts to a specific property. Finally, NOAH uses its data and insights to help clients execute flood defense measures.
The journey toward resilience and adaptation starts with understanding flood risk at a property-specific level. To fulfill its mission, NOAH plans to deliver over 12 million Flood Risk Scorecards to property owners in Canada – including scorecards for over 400,000 commercial and institutional buildings.
NOAH’s Flood Risk Methodology
The growing frequency, intensity, and widespread distribution of extreme weather events with flooding potential call for a new approach to identify and manage flood risks. To enhance climate resilience, we must better understand and implement mitigation strategies for these rising threats.
Although there are significant differences between regions, in general climate change is altering precipitation patterns by intensifying rainfall events and extending drought periods between them. Warmer air masses, energized by higher temperatures, concentrate atmospheric moisture into larger and more intense storms when the increasing frequency of appropriate atmospheric conditions allow. These storms can cause both localized flash floods and widespread regional flooding by delivering sufficient rainfall volume in a sufficiently short period of time to generate runoff flows that overwhelm municipal drainage system components, including storm sewer systems, overland flow pathways and roadway corridors. Consequently, traditional flood mapping, which tends to focus on identifying broad high-risk flood-prone areas typically associated with overbank flooding for watercourses that experience flows larger than their valley capacities or shoreline areas subject to wave uprush from large waterbodies, often overlooks localized zones with inadequate drainage systems that are now vulnerable to the increased runoff from these climate-altered precipitation patterns.
While NOAH’s capabilities extend to riverine and coastal flood risk, the company’s proprietary contributions to improved flood modeling target pluvial flood risk from inadequate drainage systems. Flooding influenced by inadequate urban drainage infrastructure needs as much attention as natural coastal and river-basin flood hazards. The presence of significant real estate assets clustered in dense urban and metropolitan areas that are disproportionately affected by this type of flooding prompted the need for alternative approaches to address this more specialized type of flood modeling and risk categorization.
By combining deep domain expertise in civil engineering with advanced innovations in hydraulic modeling, NOAH is deploying physically accurate simulations of municipal stormwater and sewershed assets. NOAH’s methodology includes the usage of traditional storm and sewer system profiles, combined with roadway corridor profiles and digital topography mapping. GIS databases, digital topography models, roadway network mapping and municipal asset management programs are all leveraged to build NOAH’s accurate digital replica of the hydraulically relevant infrastructure for surface and subsurface drainage flow.
Once created, NOAH’s hydraulic model is used to simulate the response of defined municipal areas serviced by a branching storm or combined sewer system. The output of NOAH’s approach allows for highly accurate modeling of virtual precipitation scenarios.
NOAH’s model is trained on rainfall scenarios including traditional or historical design storms, as well as variations reflecting climate change impacts. Variations impacting the model can be designed to involve simple percentage-based increases in storm intensity, along with simulations of extreme cloudbursts or catastrophic events.
Additionally, NOAH’s model can be calibrated against re-creations of historic storm events at any location. This can include re-creations of flood events from rain gauge recordings such as the ‘trailing thunderstorms’ experienced on July 16, 2024, in Toronto. The resulting runoff response can be visualized to assess relative flood risks and will generate detailed profiles for properties within the defined municipal area. This enables the creation of a “flood risk score” for each property and helps identify the scale of resiliency measures needed to mitigate potential flooding.
A key advantage of NOAH’s model is the ability to simulate system failures and identify weaknesses and tipping points that lead to flooding (experienced as runoff flows escaping the conveyance limits of the dual drainage system components) without causing real world damage. The model can also estimate when flooding surpasses tolerable levels, creating safety hazards and providing estimates of the monetary damages required for recovery.
NOAH’s data output is particularly valuable for creating detailed risk profiles for individual properties. These profiles can be considered by insurance providers in setting overland flood policy rates and help property owners understand their relative flood risks. Additionally, they can highlight potential hazards to occupants, enabling improved evacuation, preparedness and mitigation efforts.
NOAH’s approach is a highly reliable, tested process and utilizes proven software and technology with the subroutine systems required to accomplish physically accurate results. The approach allows for rapid generation of model databases virtually representing municipal drainage infrastructure as the model’s minor system where runoff flows are conveyed below ground. The addition of digital surface topography represented by DTM (digital terrain models), TIN (triangulated irregular networks) and other digital formats allows for a representation of surface features as a major system that generates, collects and conveys runoff once the conveyance capacity of the minor, below ground system is exceeded. NOAH’s dynamic approach represents a model that integrates 2D surface flow simulations with interacting sub-surface modeling, vastly enhancing location accuracy and extents where floodwater will accumulate.
Use Cases
NOAH’s model output is used to classify flood event hazards and assign damage ratings for various property types, resulting in NOAH’s Flood Scorecards for individual properties. The model is also used to support detailed flood risk assessments. Additionally, flood depth-velocity data or water depth banding shapefiles are integrated into an API layer, offering subscription-based access for flood insurance and finance providers, as well as for governments and organizations focused on climate risk and flood resilience. This data can support the validation of in-house hydraulic models for underwriting or serve as a resource for providers without in-house modeling capabilities. Other use cases include analyzing the hydraulic performance of sewershed elements to identify local improvements and performance profiles under various climate change scenarios. By collecting model outputs across different climate scenarios, valuable classifications can be generated to estimate future performance. This process also highlights system weaknesses, enabling targeted capital investments to enhance future performance.
Contact NOAH to learn more about Flood Risk Scorecards, Flood Risk Assessments and Flood Risk Data.
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]]>For decades, the term “100-year flooding event” has been used to describe catastrophic floods that are statistically expected to occur, on average, once per century. However, this terminology is increasingly misleading in today’s world of climate change, urbanization, and shifting weather patterns. What was once considered an event with a 1% chance of happening in any given year is now occurring far more often, rendering the description outdated and even misleading in flood risk planning and communication.
The Misconception of the “100-Year Flood”
These days, most people don’t assume that a “100-year flood” means they are safe from another major flood for a century after experiencing the last flood. The term refers to a flood that has a 1% probability of occurring in any given year—not a guarantee that such an event will only happen once every 100 years. In fact, in a 30-year period (the typical length of a mortgage), there is roughly a 26% chance of experiencing at least one such flood, a much higher risk than many realize. The chance of flooding is also increasing every year, as climate change brings conditions that allow more intense and frequent rainfall events occur. It’s much more like an annual lottery than a waiting game.
Origins of the “100-year flood” metric
Over 50 years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey & Hydrologic Studies came up with the concept as part of a hydrologic frequency analysis, where historical flood data was used to estimate the probability of future flood occurrences.
In 1968, the U.S. government established the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and adopted the 100-year floodplain as a regulatory tool, defining areas with a 1% annual chance of severe river flooding. This designation helped set flood insurance requirements and building codes in flood-prone areas.
The Mathematical Basis rests on probability statistics, not a fixed recurrence interval. Using historical data, 100-year flood means there was a 1 in 100 (or 1%) chance of a flood of that magnitude occurring in any given year.
Climate Change is Increasing the Frequency of Flooding
Climate change is causing more frequent and intense storms, leading to higher rainfall levels delivered in shorter periods and extreme weather conditions. Warmer temperatures increase the atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture, resulting in heavier precipitation and a higher likelihood of flooding. Areas that previously experienced a “100-year flood” once in a lifetime are now seeing them happen every decade or even more frequently. This shift makes the term not only misleading but also detrimental to helping communities prepare for future risks.
Urbanization is Making Flooding Worse
As cities expand, natural landscapes that once absorbed rainfall—such as forests and wetlands—are being replaced with concrete and asphalt, which do not absorb water effectively. This increases overall runoff volume, increasing peak flows and leads to higher flood levels even with moderate rainfall. The outdated “100-year flood” concept does not account for these rapid changes in urban hydrology, making it an unreliable measure for modern flood risk.
A Need for More Accurate Flood Risk Communication and Better Tools
Because the term “100-year flood” was so commonly misunderstood, it has led to some complacency among businesses, policymakers and homeowners. Inadequate flood insurance or flood mitigation measures have been attributed to the belief that a severe flood was unlikely within a normal lifetime. A more effective approach would be to communicate flood risk using real-world probabilities over shorter time frames. For example, instead of saying “100-year flood,” it would be clearer to state the probability of experiencing a major flood over the next 5, 10 or 30 years.”
Moving Toward Dynamic, Data-Driven Flood Risk Models
Given the unpredictability of weather patterns, the future of flood risk assessment must rely on dynamic, physically-accurate data, rather than future statistical projections based on outdated historical averages. Advances in modeling, AI-driven flood predictions, and localized risk assessments provide more accurate and actionable insights for asset owners, communities and policymakers.
Accurate flood risk data is essential to the commercial real estate industry, where climate risk-based pricing policies impact asset management decisions, valuations and insurance costs. In the past, cost barriers may have prevented CRE from acquiring the knowledge they need to begin their flood resilience and adaptation journey. Today, using NOAH’s Flood Risk Scorecards, CRE can access physically-accurate flood risk data for as little as $500, a fraction of the cost of relying on the hope that the “100-year flood” event that occurred last year won’t happen again soon.
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